1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a character recognition system for recognizing characters, such as letters and numerals, and, in particular, to a character recognizing system for recognizing handwritten characters. More specifically, the present invention relates to a character recognizing system capable of recognizing even slant characters.
2. Description of the Prior Art
A character recognizing apparatus is well known in the art and it is often called an optical character reader or simply OCR. In such a character recognizing apparatus, a character to be identified is first optically scanned to define a character pattern which is then compared with a library storing a plurality of reference character patterns. One of the difficulties encountered in recognizing an unknown character is that characters are sometimes slant especially when it is a handwritten character. The degree of inclination of handwritten character varies from person to person, which makes it difficult to recognize characters automatically by a character recognition system. Thus, in the prior art character recognition system, people were asked to write characters to be recognized without inclination as much as possible. However, such a constraint makes the character recognition system rather unattractive.
It is true that characters handwritten by some people are slant, but it is also true that the degree of inclination of handwritten characters is characteristic of personality, so that one person tends to write characters with substantially the same degree of inclination. It is thus expected that the recognition of slant characters, especially handwritten characters, can be significantly improved if the character recognition system is so structured by taking this fact into account.